This is a very ambitious book that aims to return physics ‘to its rightful
place among the liberal arts’. The estimable desire to widen both knowledge
and understanding of 20th-century physics contrasts well with the attitude
attributed to one of the former illuminati. The remark, perhaps apocryphal,
was that ‘There is only physics – everything else is just philately’. This
lofty disdain was reserved for other professional scientists working in
different disciplines. That the general public should show an informed
interest in physics was clearly not thought important. Roger Jones intends
a much wider audience for his explication of ten major concepts of modern
physics. The structure he has chosen for the book interpolates a ‘running
Talmudic commentary’ concerning the wider meaning of the concepts, as well
as their implications. While this commentary is both novel and cerebral,
it suffers from a compression of ideas and theories from disparate non-scientific
sources. The use of Immanuel Kant’s ideas to support one idea, occupying
about ten lines, produces obfuscation rather than illumination. Although
many questions are formulated throughout the text, footnotes refer the enthusiastic
reader to other sources. This is one very good feature of the book. If you
were to follow up all the cross-references there would be little time left
in life for anything else.

The misunderstandings and distortions of the meaning of relativity theory
provide the focus for the first few chapters of the book. The vain attempt
by Einstein to rename it as invariance theory might have helped stem the
misinformation, had he been successful. But such crass ideas as ‘everything
is relative’ have now been ineradicably absorbed into public consciousness.
The examples used to illustrate the special theory of relativity are accessible
and the case is clearly argued.

By chapter five, which considers a mechanistic world-view, the wisdom
of the book’s basic design seems open to doubt. The commentary chapters
are beginning to appear as interruptions to the fundamental concepts of
physics. This raises the question of who exactly the ‘rest of us’ of the
book’s title are meant to be. The eclecticism of the commentaries guarantees
that there is something for everyone but does slow the pace of the book’s
exegesis.

Another major theme is that of quantum theory. The puzzling nature of
the theory is underlined from its earliest development, especially its counter-intuitive
aspects. Some striking analogies are drawn to explain the idea of quantisation.
That a piano is necessarily quantised whereas a violin is not is an elegant
model that stays in the mind. One of Roger Jones’ strengths when writing
about physics is this use of memorable and illuminating analogies. Again,
when discussing the problem of particle-wave duality, he writes that ‘it
isn’t the absolute size that allows us to treat an object as a particle
but its size relative to its environment’. On such a basis the Earth is
a particle in the Solar System and the electron in an atom.

No attempt is made to avoid the problems that a non-physicist will have
in tackling quantum theory. ‘Quantum theory claims that science can provide
no pictures of the inner workings of nature.’ He emphasises that the theory
is both peculiar and unfamiliar. When we read that for an electron transition
‘the word ‘jump’ must be interpreted as a nonspatial transition from one
quantum state to another’ the intrinsic peculiarity is evident. There is
a curious contrast between the need for analogies to help the non-specialist
reader and the admitted existence of electrons in a ‘nonpictureable quantised
²õ³Ù²¹³Ù±ð’.

The book does make considerable assumptions about the prior knowledge
of the reader. The three pages that relate quantum states to the periodic
table of the elements would be incomprehensible without significant chemical
knowledge.

The latter part of Physics for the Rest of Us concentrates rather less
on physics and more on ethical, aesthetic and political concerns. Topics
such as physics and consciousness, atomic energy and the bomb, and physics
as art are all included. In ‘Science versus the Humanities’, the author
does avoid a recapitulation of C. P. Snow’s approach to the Two Cultures,
but makes some questionable claims of his own. This is a stimulating and
provocative book but might have been more successful with rather less of
the Talmudic commentary.

Ray Oliver is a teacher in a London comprehensive school.

In Europe, William Diller Matthew (1871-1930) is an unfamiliar figure
in the history of palaeontology. He was based in New York for most of his
professional life, where he was known as father of mammalian palaeontology.
As such he occupies a similar position in North America to William ‘Strata’
Smith (1769-1839), the pioneer of stratigraphy in Britain.

It seems inevitable that Matthew should have developed an interest in
palaeontology very early in life. His father was a pioneer palaeontologist
in New Brunswick and at the age of six William discovered a giant trilobite
in the local Cambrian shales. The specimen was 40 centimetres long and was
later named Paradoxides regina. As a child he showed considerable initiative
in fossil hunting, even collecting specimens from the discarded ballast
of cargo ships.

Throughout the closing years of the 19th century, Matthew carried out
field work in North America. He operated on a large scale as a collector,
and negotiated the purchase of many fossils from professional freelance
collectors, a practice that remains controversial today. In 1899, he was
involved in a dinosaur dig in Wyoming. By the end of the season, 30 tonnes
of dinosaur bones had been excavated for further study in New York. Few
contemporary palaeontologists have comparable experience.

The reasons for the Wyoming dig were not simply academic. Matthew and
his colleagues believed that displays of giant dinosaurs would attract both
public interest and sponsorship for the host institution. This attitude
closely parallels current preoccupations with the financial support needed
to sustain basic research.

The most interesting parts of this biography deal with ideas that have
been subsequently discredited. Among his most important papers was ‘Climate
and evolution’, published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
in 1915. In this, Matthew argued that the continents and ocean basins have
been permanent features through geological time. He also dismissed the ideas
of some of his contemporaries. They had posited hypothetical land bridges,
some improbably extending for thousands of kilometres, in order to explain
the distribution of certain animals. Matthew’s theory was that land animals
migrated between continents using ‘intercontinental connections and near
³¦´Ç²Ô²Ô±ð³¦³Ù¾±´Ç²Ô²õ’.

Matthew was a specialist in mammals of the Cenozoic, the most recent
geological era, which began 70 million years ago. When restricted to this
fauna and age range, his theories can be justified in part.

The critical analysis of scientific theories that have been superseded
is largely absent from National Curriculum science in Britain. A comparison
of the ideas set out in ‘Climate and evolution’ with those of the plate
tectonic theory provides an exemplar for the development of scientific theories,
and one that is more accessible than quantum theory and less remote than
the Copernican revolution.

The least successful parts of this biography are those that concentrate
upon family matters. Matthew the scientist was clearly a major figure and
a fascinating one, but Matthew the family man makes less compelling reading.
The author, Edwin Colbert, is both a professor of palaeontology and Matthew’s
son-in-law.

Ray Oliver teaches science at a comprehensive school in London.

To paraphrase Honore de Balzac, ‘The bookshops are full of indispensable
guidebooks’. The trouble is that they are remainder bookshops. To be successful
a new field guide must offer a novel approach or, at the very least, be
beautiful.

One message that Chris Pellant gets across clearly in The Pocket Guide
to Fossils is that fossils are part of the natural history of the past.
This emphasis on the importance of fossils and their conservation to an
understanding of past environments is unusual but welcome. Since good fossil
specimens are so often treated in isolation simply as objets d’art, it is
important to stress their real scientific significance.

The guide can also be used successfully simply at the pictorial level.
Pellant has chosen a wide range of specimens, and the excellent photography
should make identification relatively easy. The pictures illustrate specimens
that an amateur collector could reasonably hope to find. (The exceptions
would be rarities like dinosaur bones.)

Designed to withstand the rigours of fieldwork, the guide is robust
and spiral bound and filled with colour photographs of about 300 familiar
fossils. It operates at several levels and this is a strength, but it assumes
some prior knowledge of the field. It is for the amateur enthusiast, rather
than the complete beginner. The style is rather compressed, perhaps inevitable
in a pocket guide. The effect is to overload sentences with technical vocabulary,
for example: ‘The margins of the corallite are strengthened with dissepiments.’
Although the glossary does offer assistance, it does not make for an easy
read of the text.

Pellant does make it clear that a scientific approach is preferred in
fossil collecting. Nevertheless, the excitement of uncovering an example
of the ammonite hildoceras could be blunted by searching for its ‘sub-evolute
shell structure’. Perhaps this pocket guide needs a section entitled ‘assumed
prior knowledge’

Ray Oliver teaches science at a comprehensive school in London.